TWEET OF THE DAY
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Watching people meltdown over a Black Santa in the Mall of America. "Santa is white!" Well, in our internment camp he was Asian. So there.
Ã¢ÂÂ George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) December 3, 2016
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008— KBR, Halliburton sued for sickening U.S. troop :
KBR and Halliburton are the targets of a new class-action lawsuit alleging that U.S. troops have been sickened by water, food and fumes produced by the two massive private contractors, according to the Army Times . The details of the charges laid out in the lawsuit are macabre:
The lawsuit also accuses KBR of shipping ice in mortuary trucks that "still had traces of body fluids and putrefied remains in them when they were loaded with ice. This ice was served to U.S. forces."
Eller also accuses KBR of failing to maintain a medical incinerator at Joint Base Balad, which has been confirmed by two surgeons in interviews with Military Times about the Balad burn pit. Instead, according to the lawsuit ...

Today in Entertainment: The new 'Cars 3' teaser is sure to traumatize; 'Hamilton' actor responds to Trump Nov. 21, 2016, 3:49 p.m. Here's what's new and interesting in the world of entertainment and the arts today: Pixar drops a nightmare-inducing teaser for 'Cars 3'Trump won't be getting an apology...

It is unfortunate that in his article on Navitus companyâs proposed âwaste-to-energyâ incinerator in Sandy (âWhy hasnât Sandy collected 3 years of rent owed by waste-to-energy developer?,â Tribune, Oct. 10), the author states as facts what are actually controversial claims by the industry. The first, appearing in the first sentence, is that burning residential waste is a âclean alternative source of power.â Next is the line claiming that pyrolysis can âcook the cityâs waste, yielding synthetic n...
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Today, Starbucks is becoming a media company. The company this morning debuted its first-ever original content series called “Upstanders” which aims to inspire Americans with stories of compassion, citizenship and civility at a time when our nation could use a reminder of our core values. The series features podcasts, written word, and video, and will be distributed via the… Read ...

Fort Bragg, N.C. â¢ A military judge expressed skepticism Monday that letters destroyed by a top general are relevant to the prosecution of Bowe Bergdahl on charges related to his leaving his post in Afghanistan.
The judge, Army Col. Jeffery Nance, is likely to decide later in the afternoon whether the general who leads U.S. Forces Command will testify this week during pretrial hearings this week at Fort Bragg.
Bergdahlâs attorneys argue that Gen. Robert B. Abrams faced improper conflicts when he...

CRESSMAN, Calif. (AP) -- California&apos;s drought and a bark beetle epidemic have caused the largest die-off of Sierra Nevada forests in modern history, raising fears that trees could come crashing down on people or fuel deadly wildfires that could wipe out mountain communities....

Money is tight for the great majority of people right now. If renting an apartment is not for you, and you want a small house for less than $40k, then chances are it’s going to be a so-called “ tiny house .” These are typically 50 to 400 square feet and most often use a compost or chemical toilet (or, god forbid the smell, an incinerator toilet).
Here (right) is a photo of a typical tiny house from Wikipedia.
People think this is a new thing. While the reason people may be building and living in houses the size of a single room in a home may vary (“I want to downsize,” “I can make do with less,” “Who can afford a regular size house?” “My wife and kids drive me nuts!”), the fact is that people have been living in eensy-weensy domiciles for hundreds of years.
I suppose we could start with the cave, and the caveman and woman, but that’s silly. They didn’t even know about toilet paper.
In the 1800s, as the migration toward the western part of the U.S. began in earnest:
As the first waves of loggers swept ...

Documents obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act reveal how years of accidents and neglect at the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa have been polluting local land and water with hazardous chemicals including arsenic, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls, asbestos and dioxin.
Located in the center of Okinawa Island, Kadena Air Base is the largest United States Air Force installation in Asia.
Equipped with two 3.7 kilometer runways and thousands of hangars, homes and workshops, the base and its adjoining arsenal at Chibana sprawl across 46 square kilometers of Okinawa's main island. Approximately 20,000 American service members, contractors and their families live or work here alongside 3,000 Japanese employees. More than 16,000 Okinawans own the land upon which the installation sits.
Kadena Air Base hosts the biggest combat wing in the USAF -- the 18th Wing -- and, during the past seven decades, the installation has served as an important launch pad for wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. Given the long ...

Goldman Environmental Prize
Four years ago, Baltimore high school senior Destiny Watford was alarmed to learn that a waste-to-energy incinerator would soon be built in her neighborhood. The Fairfield incinerator, which was planned for a 90-acre site less than a mile from the Benjamin Franklin High School that the 17-year-old attended, was set to emit 240 pounds of mercury and 1,000 pounds of lead into the air every year.
Growing up in Baltimore’s heavily industrialized Curtis Bay neighborhood, Watford had seen the dangers that pollution posed for her community. “I know a lot of people with asthma and lung disease,” Watford told The American Prospect. “The deaths related to air pollution in Baltimore City are higher than the homicide rate.”
Watford swung into action. She cofounded Free Your Voice, a student group that began gathering testimonies and signatures from local residents who did not want to see another industrial project in their neighborhood. First, the students convinced the city’s public ...

I took note of the six recipients of the 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize on Monday. Aura Bogado at Grist has interviewed Destiny Watford, the only American who received one of the prizes this year, which are divvied up with geographical and other diversities in mind. Here’s the introduction to that interview:
Destiny Watford was a 17-year-old student at a south Baltimore high school when she asked a roomful of students if they suffered from asthma. To her dismay, every single hand went up.
That was three years ago, when Watford was in the middle of a fight to stop Energy Answers International from building a solid-waste incinerator in the Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay. Her mother, along with many friends and family members, had asthma, and her neighbor died from lung cancer. The culprits seemed obvious to Watford: the medical-waste incinerator, coal pier, and slew of chemical plants surrounding Curtis Bay that foul the air. A proposed solid-waste incinerator, the biggest of its kind in the United ...

Gina Cooley moved to Erda in 2014 after her pediatrician advised her that pollution from a medical-waste incinerator in North Salt Lake could be the source of her then-4-year-old sonâs near-daily headaches.
That same year, Stericycle also decided to move to Tooele County.
Cooley heard about the relocation only after the decision was final, she said. And before Mondayâs public hearing on the proposed facilityâs air-quality permit, she was under the impression the facility would be farther away fr...

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016."
The number one form of "renewable" energy in the United States is bioenergy, an energy source derived from burning trees, crops, manure, trash or waste for electricity and/or heat, or converting transportation fuels. According to the Energy Information Administration, 49.6 percent of renewable energy in the US in 2014 came from bioenergy; 18 percent, from wind; and 4.4 percent, from solar photovoltaics.
With 82 percent of US energy generated from fossil fuels , barring a reduction in energy consumption, policies facilitating the transition away from oil, gas and coal will likely continue to rely, in large part, on bioenergy.
Bioenergy poses risks because of its carbon emissions, contributions to air pollution and freshwater demand.
Bioenergy's main selling point is that, unlike foreign oil, it's a locally sourced feedstock, which means more money stays in local economies. Industry and ...

First, Stericycle cut a $2.3 million fine in half by promising the state that it would move out of its North Salt Lake neighborhood and take its tons of nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds and small particle pollutants with them.
Then the operator of one of the nationâs few remaining medical waste incinerators tentatively won the stateâs permission to emit even more poisons at its new Tooele County facility as long as it promised to continuously monitor some of the more dangerous emissio...

Taiwan has institutionalized the practice of feeding leftover food to livestock, an approach that many nations are using or considering to reduce their food waste. Now, two thirds of the country’s overall food waste helps feed its 5.5m pigs
Every night, classical music blares from garbage trucks in Taipei, summoning people from their homes. In their hands, they clutch bags or buckets of kitchen scraps, which they dump into a bin on the truck. From there, the food travels to farms, where it helps ensure a good supply of one of Taiwan’s food staples.
Farmers have fed leftover food to livestock for centuries, but Taiwan is one of a handful of countries that have institutionalized the practice. About two thirds of the island nation’s overall food waste, which totaled 610,000 tons last year, goes to help feed the country’s 5.5m pigs – the top meat source for the country’s 23.5 million ...